I’d reviewed one of Annette Blair’s books previously and gave it five stars. It was fun. Sweet. And while it had a few formatting problems, it wasn’t enough to drop the rating a star.
I’d considered buying more from her then saw that she had a different book up for free and I went. Score!
To answer my gif… so so much.
The story hinges around Patience and Grant. Patience is hired as a chaperone and expert of all things British by several social climbing Americans to introduce their daughters to society and help secure them good husbands. Grant is a member of the nobility who enjoys spending time captaining his own vessels. It doesn’t help that both Patience and Grant are hiding things.
Lots of things.
Cue wacky hijinks and Benny Hill’s Theme Song.
I am not making this up. It’s like Jane Austen met the Animaniacs and proceeded to have an adventure together.
Now normally I’d love this kind of thing. And here’s the thing, for the most part I enjoyed the book. But the sitcom antics went a bit to overboard… see what I did there… and some the of characters (mostly the girls) were pretty darn annoying.
So why am I so down on this book? The answer is editing/finishing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again here. Presentation matters.
The formatting was off. Really off. There were paragraph spaces in random places. Like the middle of sentences. And they were also used as scene breaks/POV breaks. So I was often lost as to whose head we were in and if we’d had a scene break. The formatting was that off.
Additionally this book had been published by one of the big five previously. What does that mean? That it’s been professionally edited. The author states that it had to be cut down to meet the publishing house’s standards for the anthology it was in so that there’s now half a book more there. The problem… that half that was cut and has now been restored wasn’t edited. At all. There were so many proofreading errors. Things that any editor would catch. Things like ‘had’ for ‘hand’ and ‘waste’ for ‘waist.’ Also one of the girls, Sophie… literally disappears and is never heard from again toward the end of the book. It’s not deliberate. The author clearly lost track of her characters.
Additionally she could easily have cut three scenes and at least one of the characters.
I debated long and hard about what rating to give this. So I went back and looked at the book again, refreshing it and redownloading it. The errors are still there. The formatting is still off. There are lots of reviews which point this out so the author has no excuse.
So for those reasons I can only give this two stars.
The book is Free from most major retailers.
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